Arriving in the wake of the Oscar-winning WOODSTOCK (1970), this cross-country concert tour focuses on a community composed of scraggly hippies adorned in tie-dyed fashions and traveling in psychedelic buses. The caravan spends 21 days on the road, experiencing America.
San Francisco disc jockey Tom Donahue inaugurates the tour, pulling together 150 local freaks. Various musical acts meet them along the way, as they hit the road for a coast-to-coast tour. Though the travelers refer to themselves as a circus, this is more like a movable squat, and everything looks
promising--at first. Then the buses begin breaking down, police pull over the bikers, and a trailer explodes. Along the way, B.B. King provides an early concert highlight. Other performers include Doug Kershaw and his electric violin, Stoneground and Alice Cooper (who performs "Black Juju,"
complete with pillow feathers, smoke, and a gun).
Despite the interesting musical segments, much of the film's running time is taken up with the makeshift hippie community, as they tune on, tune in, and try to finish a complete sentence. On the road, they meet hitchhiker "King Paul of the World," a disheveled self-professed hobo on crutches;
several real cowboys; as well as the "STP Family," a community of ex-Green Berets so screwed up by Vietnam that they dropped out of society. Toward the end of the tour, at Antioch College, tempers flare when the caravan collides with students who dislike the idea of this corporate-funded tour
invading their area--saying it's just an excuse for a money-making movie.
At first glance, this film has all of the makings of a counterculture event. But while WOODSTOCK, released a year earlier, felt like the beginning of a new era, this caravan feels more like an unexpected bummer. The first major problem lies in its lack of musical talent, with Alice Cooper and B.B.
King as the biggest names on board. To remedy that, the filmmakers take the misguided route of trying to make their interchangeable, socially crippled flower children into the stars. Unfortunately, they're vapid at best and annoying at worst, as they play to the camera and mention how they've seen
EASY RIDER (1969)--and feel like they're now living it.
Director Francois Reichenbach seems to have operated with the idea of shooting everything in sight, and whittling it down in the editing room. To accomplish this task, the filmmakers enlisted a young Martin Scorsese, who helped edit WOODSTOCK and, working as a post-production supervisor, pruned
this to a lean 88 minutes. As it stands, the film incorporates every hallucinogenic camera trick in the book, from split-screen to trippy visuals, in hopes no one will notice how thin the whole enterprise was. The musical performances are good, but all too infrequent--with Alice Cooper providing
the strangest moments, and B.B. King, the most memorable. It's too bad these scenes are relatively short, since Reichenbach's focus on the caravan participants quickly grows tiresome. The most memorable encounters remain at the periphery, with the STP Family and the Antioch confrontation bringing
a brief, hard-to-ignore reality to this otherwise forgettable film. (Nudity, substance abuse, profanity.) leave a comment
